where y'at?

And it's sort of what one of my dear readers was asking when she caught me doing everything but posting:

did you:
-slip on leftover mardi gras beads and are now in traction
-get kidnapped by rogue voodoo ghosts
-oversleep ?

Well, Mardi Gras beads and ghosts of some sort did sort of grab me and, yes, I spent too much time sleeping.

But I've had some lucid waking moments, including:

• time spent at the recent Congressional Field Hearing in New Orleans on the housing crisis, chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Ca.), at Dillard University. It was marvelous theater, a good example of democracy in action, and will matter only if the draft legislation now working its way through both houses of Congress amounts to something. (For a good account, and audioclips of the hearings, look here.)

• a chance to sit in on a meeting on the ten-member committee setting goals for a nascent "New Orleans Jazz Advocacy Task Force." Bethany Bultman (of the New Orleans Musicians Clinic), who hosted the meeting, was half-joking when she called the assemblage a "Traditional Jazz Anti-Defamation League." You'll here more on this group soon. And should you arrive at Louis Armstrong Airport soon and find a brass band playing when you land, along with flyers promoting the real-deal gigs, you'll have these folks to thank.